Free Further Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes Page A

flung themselves at it, doing that thing that the Irish do, wrestling people to the ground, trying to pay for everything. See, I like that.
Day three
    Met Valya on the way down for breakfast and made the mistake of asking, ‘How did you sleep?’ Most people would just say, ‘Fine.’ But Valya rendered a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Clopping down the stairs to the breakfast room, she said, ‘I am thinking about him making the sex with his new one and I cannot sleep. I smoke all night and think of him making the sex with me instead.’
    Still talking loudly about making the sex, we entered a neat little dining room with white, linen, embroidered tablecloths and napkins. Everything was charmingly twee, apart from the telly blasting out techno at a level that felt like a physical assault, and the fug of cigarette smoke obscuring the sideboard of food.
    That afternoon we proceeded to the town hall. Nizhni Novgorod was having an arts festival and I was the star exhibit! The place was jammers, the atmosphere was buoyant and lovely people kept appearing to practise their English on me, except Pyotr kept trying to shoo them away so he could have me to his (smelly) self.
    Then it was showtime and just as I mounted the stage to start my reading, the lights flickered once, twice, then disappeared entirely. What the…? It was the electricity! We were having a power cut. A lovely, authentic Russianpower cut! Was it the real thing or were they just laying it on for us tourists? Oh it seemed to be the real thing, alright. Everyone was rushing around and people kept promising me, ‘This never happens.
Never!
’
    Enquiries were made: was it a localized thing? Just the town hall, perhaps? But no, the whole town was out. Even though it was only three in the afternoon, it was quite dark. A decision was made; I would do my reading by candlelight. But I couldn’t read and hold my candle at the same time, in case I set my book on fire, so the love-struck Pyotr was on his feet offering to hold my candle. As it were. So the show went on, with Pyotr taking every opportunity to stand far too close to me. But hey, I was facing forty and flattered.
    Afterwards, I fell among poets. There was a load of them in the front row, several looking like James Joyce, right down to the flattened hair, roundy glasses and sober suits. They grabbed me as I stepped off the stage and all gave me signed copies of their slender volumes. Although I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, they were a right laugh.
    Armed with home-printed books of Russian poetry, I returned to Valya and Himself and we watched a little drama in mime. (It ended tragically.) Then someone sang a song. (A sad one.) Then there was a stand-up comedian. (A special unfunny Russian one.)
    But then there was some sort of disturbance. A kerfuffle. The poets seemed to be staging some kind of anarchic takeover. There were an awful lot of them crowding onto the small stage, looking like Kool and the Gang. Then a guitar appeared and they wouldn’t stop singing.
    It was a great,
great
afternoon, everyone had been so nice.But Artim, the wonderful man who had organized it all, wouldn’t take the praise. ‘It’s those damn poets,’ he said. ‘They stage a takeover every year and this year they
promised
.’
Day four
    Up horribly, horribly early to catch the plane to Samara – too early even for the techno, smoke-filled breakfast.
    The week before I’d been in the US and got mightily humbled for having tweezers in my hand luggage, so Himself made me promise that I had nothing dangerous on my person for this flight. Not that it mattered a damn. I could have carried a ground-to-air rocket-launcher onto the plane and no one would have minded. They’d probably have helped me lift it on.
    It was a novel flying experience. Nothing was screened through any metal-detector yokes and the plane looked like a toy plane with steps that went up from under into its belly. There were no conveyor